Fractured Eden
A three-wall CAVE installation exploring the impact of human activity on a rainforest ecosystem, staging the audience inside the environment rather than in front of it. Built in collaboration with Will Quash and Serina P., I led the sound design, spatialisation, and mix.
Concept
Fractured Eden is an immersive installation built for the three-walled CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) system at the University of Bristol. Rather than a single screen, the piece plays across three synchronised projections that surround the audience, placing them inside a rainforest environment reacting to human activity rather than watching it from a distance.
The project was a close collaboration. Will Quash led asset creation, animation and video editing — modelling and animating the environment in Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine, and cutting the final three-camera edit in DaVinci Resolve — while Serina P. supported onboarding and set design for the CAVE space. My focus was the sound: designing and spatialising the audio so it moved with the audience rather than simply sitting underneath the picture.
A synced three-camera loop from the CAVE build — left, middle and right walls rendered in Unreal Engine and connected as one continuous environment.
Sound Design
My side of the project was built around layering and processing rather than composing from scratch. I sourced licensed ambient recordings and combined them with sound effects drawn from royalty-free asset libraries, then mixed and processed the material live through a Xone:PX5 — using its filters and effects to add movement, distortion and texture.
The more technical part of the process was spatialising that mix for the CAVE's audience headphones using the IEM Plugin Suite, an ambisonics toolkit that let me place and move sounds around the listener in three dimensions rather than just left-to-right. A truck passing through the scene, for example, would start behind the audience while it was off-screen, grow louder from the right as it entered frame, and pan past and away as it left — tracking the geometry of what was happening across the three walls around them.
Listen
Sound Design Mix for Fractured Eden
A look into the different ambisonics plug-ins — for this specific project, Room Encoder and Stereo Encoder were used most.